Mixed Medicines: Health and Culture in French Colonial Cambodia

Abstract

This volume examines the encounter between French and Southeast Asian medical ideas. Like David Arnold and others who have written on colonial medicine, the author focuses on the colonised body, medical institutions, and healers. She finds French and Khmer medical systems to be incommensurable after the fashion of Thomas Kuhn’s notion of pre-Copernican and Copernican cosmologies. The author argues that French and Khmer visions of health and the body were culturally insoluble, and seeks to ‘qualify the claims of universalism in Western medical sciences and of syncretism in one Southeast Asian society. Techniques to treat the body remained in discrete camps; basic metaphysical assumptions on the body, health, and disease remained distinct.’ The book chronicles French cultural mis-understandings and medical failures and sets its story within a historiographic framework similar to George Basalla’s 1967 binary model of colonial cores and peripheries with a few Latourian nods to how Cambodia functioned as a laboratory for French medical advance.